In their “Open
Letter to the American People,” released last week,
a group called “Historians Against Trump” declared that “the
lessons of history compel us to speak out against [Donald] Trump.”
Their motives, they insisted, were not partisan in the least, but
rather they were simply a collection of school teachers, public
historians, and graduate students united by their common conviction
“that the candidacy of Donald J. Trump poses a threat to American
democracy.” There followed an indictment whose list of particulars
gave no hint of academic expertise but could have been assembled by
anyone who owns a television or computer, much less reads a newspaper
now and then. Yet the statement suggested that a well-defined
professional skill set left its historian-signatories well equipped
to topple the Trump campaign and build “an inclusive civil society
in its place.

As is frequently
the case with letters or other statements drafted by a committee
whose members are passionate about the rightness and importance of
their cause, this one occasionally waxed a bit grandiose in some of
its language and imagery. In this and the exposure it received, the
historians’ impassioned missive amounted a big, fat, hanging
curveball tossed squarely in the wheelhouse of none other than the
switch-hitting, language-bending, career-contrarian critic of
practically everything, Stanley Fish. Once tagged,
ironically enough, as “the
Donald Trump of American academia,” in his early
incarnation as a literary theorist and campus wheeler-dealer, this
“brash, noisy entrepreneur of the intellect,”
seemed to stoke much the same public outrage against the Academy that
the shape-shifting Fish now undertakes to exploit himself, courtesy
of the bully platform afforded him by the New York Times.

At any rate, the
historians’ “open letter” afforded an irresistible
opportunity for Fish to do precisely what he loves
best, i.e., play word games, preferably, as in this case, with
unsuspecting adversaries. For example, mocking
the writers’ insistence that “as historians, we consider diverse
viewpoints while acknowledging our own limitations and subjectivity,”
he found “very little acknowledgment of limitations and
subjectivity” in their apparent conflation of “political
opinions” with “indisputable, impartially arrived at truths,”
as in: “Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is a campaign of
violence: violence against individuals and groups; against memory and
accountability; against historical analysis and fact.” “How’s
that,” Fish asked, “for cool, temperate and disinterested
analysis?”

Possibly a bit juiced by his
merciless flaying of yet another offending text, Fish went on to
boldly declare that historians “are wrong to insert themselves into
the political process under the banner of academic expertise.” He
may have barely worked up a sweat in puncturing the presumptuous
rhetoric of writers whose zeal may have occasionally run roughshod
over their discretion, but he was not exactly free from presumption
himself when he lectured the parties to the document on the actual
nature of their job, which is, to wit: “To teach students how to
handle archival materials, how to distinguish between likeable and
unreliable evidence, how to build a persuasive account of a disputed
event, in short, how to perform as historians, not as seers or
gurus.”

Not surprisingly, like many academics,
some historians have taken none too kindly to being told where “their
competence lies” or having the parameters of their discipline
defined by someone who is neither a fellow practitioner nor much of a
fan of parameters himself. Taken at face value, this little
interdisciplinary dustup might seem at first glance like little more
than simply another tempest in the faculty lounge teapot, and a
largely contrived one at that. I no more believe that the
overwhelming majority of the people who signed on with “Historians
Against Trump” really meant to suggest that their academic
credentials entitle them to speak more authoritatively on current
affairs than others—nor do I believe that Stanley Fish actually
believes it either—than I believe that either Fish or anyone else
can make a legitimate argument that those credentials should inhibit
such activity. Even if, as I suspect, this latter suggestion was
offered largely as a deliberate provocation, it requires at least
something of a response because, regardless of the trappings in which
it might be delivered, we have never been in more urgent need of
historically informed social and political commentary than we are
right now.

Though they are
certain to face accusations of favoritism from one side or the other
if not both, historians who venture into these waters incur no
obligation to the candidates themselves. If they have done their
dead-level best to offer their readers a balanced, detached view of
relevant historical phenomena from which they may reach their own
conclusions, scholars are not party to partisanship simply because
the implications of their work prove more favorable to one aspirant
than the other. The matter of what parts of the past are deemed
relevant will inevitably be shaped in large part by the candidates’
positions on the most salient issues of the campaign, although the
obvious concerns that go largely unaddressed in the partisan sphere
are still fair game in the historical arena. For example, the effects
of the high tariff policies of the 1920s in fostering and
exacerbating economic distress at home and abroad clearly deserve
attention in light of Donald Trump's apparent disposition to
protectionism in some form and circumstances. On the other hand,
however, there is the equally critical issue of already enormous and
still widening gaps in wealth and income that were generally blown
off by the Republican administrations of the pre-Depression era and,
though they loom equally portentous today, still seem closer to the
margins of the current campaign than the core.

Clearly, candidates
who embrace what are perceived to be extreme positions are inviting
the most expansive examination of their historical antecedents, and
this year's GOP nominee is no exception. Flipping through the pages
of American history, it is pretty hard to find much of an upside to
recurrent appeals to xenophobia, which have never ended other than
badly, either for the demonized immigrants themselves or for the
nation as a whole. When it comes to the politics of fear and guilt by
association and innuendo, Donald Trump may still be a dive or two shy
of plumbing the depths reached by red-baiting Wisconsin Sen. Joseph
McCarthy in the 1950s, but it is hard to imagine McCarthy resisting a
knowing wink at Trump's suggestion of a link between Sen. Ted Cruz's
father and Lee Harvey Oswald.

Trump's unfiltered addiction to the
spotlight virtually mandates a search for his personal and policy
precursors. This does not mean, however, that Hillary Clinton, who
has, for obvious reasons, sought aggressively to minimize the
exposure of her past, has earned any reprieve from the historical
third-degree. Clinton, for example, has been more circumspect in her
attitude toward recent controversial free-trade agreements like TPP,
but like her husband, she should forever bear the yoke of the hideous
NAFTA treaty, which ruined the lives of thousands of U.S. textile and
apparel workers, devastated their communities, and left them crippled
in their efforts to recover. Though Clinton has tried to distance
herself from NAFTA, President Obama was on the mark back when he
quipped that she said “great things about NAFTA
until she started running for president.” It is also worth noting
that Hillary's email fiasco is hardly the first manifestation of an
obsession with secrecy and a desire to use it for political
protection and aggrandizement. If you don't find this a troubling
inclination for a presidential candidate, then you're either too old
or too young to remember Watergate and the national trauma it
inflicted.

Anyone cognizant of
historical processes and the critical importance of the discrete
contexts in which particular events and trends have played out also
understands that such comparisons and analogies should be advanced as
cautiously by scholars as they are received by readers. Proceeding
cautiously, however, is not the same as proceeding timidly, and in
this case, it is eminently preferable to not proceeding at all.
Stanley Fish and others may well be content to give the last word to
the old duffer in the New Yorker cartoon who allows that while
“Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. . . .
Those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly
while everyone else repeats it.” I trust, however, that the great
majority of my colleagues will agree that no one who is possessed of
a genuine historical consciousness is by any means “helpless,”
much less “doomed”— or perhaps even entitled — to simply
“stand by” and allow whatever lessons the past affords to go not
just unheeded, but unheard.